Networked Performance (N_P), a research blog that focuses on emerging network-enabled practice, announces issue 10 of Culture Machine, dedicated to the theme of Pirate Philosophy: “Pirate Philosophy explores how the development of various forms of so-called internet piracy is affecting ideas of the author, the book, the scholarly journal, peer review, intellectual property, copyright law,… Continue reading
P2P and non-selfish individualism
Rosemary Bechler, in a debate with Jeremy Gilbert in Open Democracy, makes a few crucial distinctions between individualism and ‘selfish individualism’. Excerpts: “Cruddas and Rutherford (in Soundings 42) open their critique by drawing the fault-lines in the current political turmoil between “those who continue to believe that the market and individual choice” are the most… Continue reading
Varieties of Augmented Government
Just as social software is not about replacing human intelligence with software, but augmenting it, government 2.0 is not a matter of substituting government with bottom-up initiatives, but augmenting its innovativeness and its impact by letting third parties build on top of government data and services. David Osimo, who participates in the Open Declaration blog,… Continue reading
Creating a political framework for the free culture movement: FC Forum Barcelona October 29 to November 1
This gathering in Barcelona from October 29 to November 1 may well be one of the most important of the year, because it will set a political framework and agenda for the free culture movement and represents a maturation and coming of age. I am happy to be able to participate. Here’s the formal introduction… Continue reading
We Must Protect Net Neutrality in Europe
We Must Protect Net Neutrality in Europe! Organizations from all around Europe share their concern of seeing Net Neutrality being sacrificed during the conciliation procedure of the directives of the EU Telecoms Package. They sent this letter to the Members of the European Parliament, urging them to take decisive action in order to guarantee a… Continue reading
Wikinomics and its discontents
Article: Wikinomics and its discontents: a critical analysis of Web 2.0 business manifestos. By José Van Dijck and David Nieborg (University of Amsterdam Abstract: ‘Collaborative culture’, ‘mass creativity’ and ‘co-creation’ appear to be contagious buzzwords that are rapidly infecting economic and cultural discourse on Web 2.0. Allegedly, peer production models will replace opaque, top-down business… Continue reading
What’s so Open about Open Capital?
I asked Chris Cook, why his proposed ownership modalities of Open Capital, could be characterized as open … Chris Cook: “Our current forms of property rights are absolute. Either/or. Either: (a) absolute and permanent eg freehold land or shareholder value style (and inaptly named) “Equity” in the form of shares in Limited Liability Corporations; or… Continue reading
Cybernetics for resource based economics
A contribution by Alton Lindsay Jr.: One of the key aspects of enhancing P2P in the material world is figuring out how we can divide up natural resources for means of production. And while we divide up such resources, the need for stabilizing this resource throughput and waste disposal is important in not deteriorating ecosystems…. Continue reading
Whuffie Bank rewards reputation and online generosity
The Whuffie Bank is a nonprofit organization dedicated to building a new currency based on reputation that could be redeemed for real and virtual products and services. The higher your reputation, the wealthier you are. I really like this Whuffie Bank initiative, it looks well implemented and easy to use. It may one day help… Continue reading
SME’s, local development, and mutual credit systems
A convincing case is made by Thomas Greco: “It is widely acknowledged that, in comparison to large corporations, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) contribute proportionately more to the economy in jobs, productivity, and innovation. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), “SMEs play a major role in economic growth in the OECD… Continue reading
A milestone for distributed manufacturing: 100k Garages
The Treehugger blogs says, “this changes everything” (and Core77 agrees): Why? Because the 100kgarages initiative combines hyper-localization and global scalability!. Imagine for a minute we would have a p2p-maker-market in each town, with specialized maker sheds, connected to global downloadable design communities, but each specialized in different areas such as open source furniture, metalwork, retrofitting… Continue reading
Against the deliberate cultivation of narcissism in personal development
One of the main psychological change technologies found in personal development literature is to affirm and/or visualize precisely what you want, with great emotional force. This key technique can be found again and again in classic texts … When practiced intensely and frequently as recommended, this technique literally becomes “the cultivation of inflation”—the deliberate and… Continue reading
The Argentinian interview
The interview was conducted by Facundo García, a journalist from an argentinian newspaper called Pagina12. It appeared on 23 August, with the 2 first answers translated into Spanish. Interview: 1) Recently you said that p2p is about to become a political force. However, some very interesting groups, like The Pirate Party in Sweden, seem to… Continue reading
Launch of Open P2P Design bookshop
Massimo Menichinelli of Open P2P Design has opened a openp2pdesign.org store page on Lulu.com You will find there all the print version of the books published within the openp2pdesign.org project. The first book you can already find there is the print version of openp2pdesign.org_1.1, already published online in September 2008. Three versions are available: one… Continue reading
What are Space Guidance Widgets?
We asked Gary Jackson to explain his p2p-inspired Space Strategy project, i.e. Space Guidance Widgets, an attempt to make knowledge work sustainable. Gary Jackson: “Simplicity is obviously the other side of complexity! To an Architect – as I am – this seems a very sensible premise and aligns with my favorite quote ever, “Everything should… Continue reading
Legal challenge against the private ownership of human genes
We missed this report by David Bollier: “Granting property rights in genes is supposed to be a necessary incentive to spur medical innovation and treat disease better. In practice, it is now clear that exclusive patents on genetic knowledge are an arcane form of monopoly. Not surprisingly, this means that patent holders have the ability… Continue reading